Under pressure from Moscow, the Ukrainian S.S.R, authorities issued a decree in November 1932 prohibiting collective farm members from creating any reserves or dis¬tributing any food to its members until all obligations to the state had been met. That means, the legalized seizure of the last pound, the last kernel of grain.

December 6, 1932, a system of blacklist for villages who had not met their quota was introduced. It was a total economic blockade of the village.

On January 11, 1933, Stalin personally blamed the difficulties in meeting these quotas on the collective farmers who were supposedly setting up all kinds of reserves and selling off the grain for profit, as well as on Communists who had failed to collect the grain soon enough after the harvest

In spite of such extremely severe measures taken by the authorities in Ukraine, the central authorities in Moscow, and Stalin himself, censured the Communist Party of Ukraine for what it called ‘criminal negligence* in failing to meet the targets for the state grain procurements. A special All-Union Central Committee decree of January 24, 1933, did this, and named Pavel Postyshev to be the Ukrainian Second Secretary and Stalin’s de facto satrap in Ukraine.

Postyshev immediately announced a policy of a ’substantial increase of repressive measures’, and that’s Postyshev’s own phrase, against class enemies and insisted that procurements, that is, these grain seizures, be speeded up. And, the speeches are published. It’s just that no one has ever really quoted them before.

It became apparent, however, that everything that could be taken had already been seized and this led, at the end of February, to a seed loan without which there would have been no 1933 crop in Ukraine.

Now, fourthly, Postyshev had a dual mandate being sent into the Ukrainian S.S.R. He was not only supposed to intensify the grain seizures and, therefore, famine in Uk¬raine, he was also charged with eliminating any and all ‘national deviations’, that is, such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed in the Soviet Union. As he admitted in his speech before the November 1933 plenum of the Ukrainian Central Committee, on December 14, 1932, an unpublished decision had been taken by the All-Union C.P.S.U. Central Committee and the Soviet government in Moscow which ordered their counterparts in Ukraine to, essentially, look for nation¬al deviations, and to disperse ‘bourgeois nationalist’ sentiments from the Party and the state.

Postyshev himself carried out this decree in the Ukrainian S.S.R, by eliminating the nationally self-assertive wing of the Communist Party of Ukraine, by labeling any ves¬tige of Ukrainian national self-assertion as a ‘deviation’ or worse, and by suppressing it Thus, the famine was used by Moscow and its appointed representatives in an at¬tempt to destroy any manifestation of Ukrainian national identity.

Fifthly, nationality policy (what to do about non-Russians in the Soviet Union) reflected policy toward the countryside, and there are numerous Soviet statements to this effect Thus it was that the crushing of the Ukrainian peasantry made possible the crushing of Ukrainian national self-assertion. And, it is difficult to find any other reason which explains why a famine like this was allowed to occur when it clearly could have been averted, but rather was, in fact, provoked by state policy.

Indeed, Postyshev’s 1933 mandate could only have been calculated to make things even worse than they already were in terms of conditions in the countryside. It would